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Friday, July 12, 2013

A thought struck me after watching The Mittani, Marc Scaraus and Darius JOHNSON on their new show Wednesday. While industrialists in null sec are no more important now than before the launch of Odyssey, changes in industry are extremely important.

If someone who plays MMOs asks me what caused all of the fighting we are witnessing in EVE, I would say that CCP added two new crafting materials and changed the material requirements on a whole bunch of crafting recipes. That's right. The trillions of ISK lost (which someone will convert to real world currency), the tens of thousands of man-hours worth of work destroyed, all the propaganda videos created and bad posting on forums, were caused by changes to the crafting system.

"Tonight we are invading Fountain. But we are not going to bother with
stating a grievance or demonizing the defender - We are doing it because
we need the region and its moons for our people and our friends."

I wonder how many MMORPG game developers look at EVE with jealously in their hearts. Most of those developers are looking at ways to create content fast enough to satisfy their players. ArenaNet has even gone to an insanely fast two-week deployment cycle for adding content to Guild Wars 2. But "all" CCP had to do was devote a small team of developers, probably supported by the economics team, and jiggle some numbers around. Hard, difficult work to do properly? Yes. But compared to what other studios are doing, pretty cost-effective.

Of course, CCP can do this because of all the work done over the previous 10 years building a player-run economy. Some game developers look at a game's economy and its crafting system as an afterthought. In EVE Online, crafting is serious business and CCP is reaping the rewards.

9 comments:

What has happened so far is just scratching the surface. The goons and the rest of the null sec cartels and their CCP lackeys, soundwave et al, are making massive changes to the industry mechanics that will devastate high sec industry, and transfer isk generation to null sec that will make the 20% transfer of ice wealth look like tip money.

CCP will be announcing the December release is all about "rebalancing" industry more, and that means the nerfing of T2 industry coupled with a massive buff to T2 null sec indsutry, if not the total abolition of T2 industry in high sec. And this is only the first step in a 2 release campaign to finish off high sec as a profit centre.

Why would they do this? Three letters: RMT.Not only do they get sick enjoyment of wrecking the game for thousands of people, the income from the taxes from the now highly valuable null sec mfg station slots will dwarf any moon goo income.

The RMT income for those that control the wallets that the T2 industry income flows through will be huge.

Uh, I fail to see your point. Manufacturing in null sec SHOULD be more valuable than high sec. Otherwise what's the point of ever using it? Just because you want to sit in high sec with 20 mining bots doesn't mean the rest of the game enjoys that. Any company would likely "wreck the game for thousands of people" if it meant improving the game for tens of thousands of people and drawing in more players.

Well crafting and industry are different. With crafting its generally a very specific formula possibly with grinding and whatnot, and more often than not you only do it for friends or occasionally an auction house. Furthermore no other game I know of has a significant portion of its playerbase dedicated to "crafting". Eve is unique in the aspect because we have industry, that involves coordination across multiple characters, with goodness knows how many specializations to complete a single project. Not even saying anything about the sheer manpower involved in collecting the raw resources and completing the project.... and defending it occasionally.